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Category Archives: Hardware

Leap motion presents a new motion controller that can detect your finger and hand motion to bring a fluidic experience to interact with your computer. The leap motion sensor is a high quality sensor and tiny for your computer, be it your PC or Laptop or a PAD, to detect your finger and hand motions you would naturally do, so that you can wave, grab, pick & put it down and point at something.

This 3-inch motion sensor, would give you to actually enable you to do the Iron man 2 things. See it to believe:

The ATI Radeon 7k series codenamed Southern Islands are expected to be based on something known as the VLIW4 (Very Long Instruction Word ) SP arrangement circuits. The same circuitry is used in the high end HD 6900 series. FYI the HD 6800 Series were based on VLIW5 arrangement. Theoretically both architectures provide similar computation power, VLIW4 providing reduced die size. Without jumping further, lets see whats this VLIW4 is?

VLIW4 Architecture

Click here to know more about this Architecture

VLIW4 is a chip architecture, you can say it is the GPU technology architecture. In VLIW4 where the number 4 (of VLIW4) means group of 4 SP’s (or 4 SIMD processor) which form a functional unit or AMD Radeon cores (Math units) of this new circuit architecture. All 4 SP’s have same computational potential. However, two of the SP’s especially every 3rd and 4th SP in the group has some special function which is currently unknown, but it may be used for scheduling other SP’s in the group. In 7k series, each SIMD will now be able to perform two GPE’s (Graphics Processing Engine) Cycle. This means almost 3-4x performance increase is expected as compared to the current generation one’s. VLIW designs are unique and are designed to execute many operations from the same task in parallel by breaking it up into smaller groupings called Wavefronts (In case you are wondering about NVIDIA, this is same as CUDA cores /WARP). In AMD’s case a wavefront is a group of 64 pixels/values (A warp on the other hand is 32-bit) and the list of instructions to be executed against them. Ideally, in a wavefront a group of 4 or 5 instructions will come down the pipe and be completely non-interdependent, allowing every Radeon core to be fed. [Read More at @nandtech]

While 7k series will be based on VLIW4, HD7900 will built on a different technology, a stepping stone for AMD’s GPU architecture called as GCN.

GCN (Graphics Core Next) Architecture

ATI brings in the Graphics Core Next (GCN) which is the architectural basis for AMD’s future GPUs, both for discrete products and for GPUs integrated with CPUs as part of AMD’s APU products. AMD will be introducing a major overhaul of its traditional GPU architecture for future generation products in order to meet the direction of the market and where they want to go with their GPUs in the future. The main focus is on the compute capability of the GPU’s targeting towards high performance computing for enterprise markets where precision is a key. The GCN is completely a non-VLIW4 architecture, means that the architecture will be focusing completely on the threads now instead of instructions. To be precise, the non-VLIW4 SIMD would run parallelism at thread level also known as the TLP (Thread Level Parallelism), the one which NVIDIA follows. The new 7k series with GCN architecture would be able to perform double precision floating point operations i.e FP64. There’s more to it.

Leaked Specification ATI Radeon HD 7k Series

RAMBUS XDR™2

For the first time, ATI GPU’s higher end 7k series 7970 and 7950 will harbor XDR™2 memories. The XDR™2 memory architecture is the world’s fastest memory system solution capable of providing more than twice the peak bandwidth per device when compared to a GDDR5-based system. Further, the XDR 2 (2005 by RAMBUS) memory architecture delivers this performance at 30% lower power than GDDR5 at equivalent bandwidth.

Click here to go to RAMBUS XDR™2 Page

XDR™2 will provide high-performance to gaming, graphics and multi-core compute applications. Each XDR 2 DRAM can deliver up to 80GB/s of peak bandwidth from a single, 4-byte-wide, 20Gbps XDR 2 DRAM device. With this capability, systems can achieve memory bandwidth of over 500GB/s on a single SoC. Watch to know more.

AMD launching the Southern islands in 2012 Q2 seems very exciting. AMD will be launching its 7k series with the 28nm GPU with VLIW4 and will later introduce the Graphics Core Next. With the advancement and more and more opting of DX11, 7k series would definitely accelerate the current tessellation performance and mostly the long awaited GPU Compute Capability.

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The new Android version 3.1 platform introduces Android Open Accessory support, which allows external USB hardware (an Android USB accessory) to interact with an Android-powered device in a special “accessory” mode. This new feature enables any accessory hardware such as robotics controllers; docking stations; diagnostic and musical equipment; kiosks; card readers; digital cameras, keyboards, mice, game controllers and much more to be connected in an “accessory” mode, the connected accessory acts as the USB host (powers the bus and enumerates devices) and the Android-powered device acts as the USB device. Android USB accessories are specifically designed to attach to Android-powered devices and adhere to a simple protocol (Android accessory protocol) that allows them to detect Android-powered devices that support accessory mode. Accessories must also provide adhere to the charging power.

Early Android-powered devices are only capable of acting as a USB device and cannot initiate connections with external USB devices. With this new feature in 3.1 Android Open Accessory support overcomes this limitation and allows hardware lovers to build accessories that can interact with an assortment of Android-powered devices by allowing the accessory to initiate the connection.

The Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK) provides an implementation of an Android USB accessory that is based on the Arduino open source electronics prototyping platform, the accessory’s hardware design files, code that implements the accessory’s firmware, and the Android application that interacts with the accessory. The hardware design files and firmware code are contained in the ADK package download.

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So NVIDIA is taking the smartphone market by its evolving SoC’s. World’s first SoC manufacturer and designer to bring a Dual-core along with a Dual-core 3D and now they are about to show their so called Nvidia romour, The Quad-Core smartphone processors. The specs and the level of features are un-certain at this moment but its clear from their Tegra Evolution path that these processors are deliriously powerful.

For the record, At CES 2011 Tegra 2 chips have already powered flagship Android devices like the LG Optimus 2X and Motorola Atrix 4G and Motorola’s Xoom tablet. And we’re looking forward for many launches at the MWC 2011.

That’s actually very exciting and will be exciting if we see these processors in action at the retail market soon.

NVIDIA Tegra 4…What??

Android phones are about to get quite ridiculously powerful if NVIDIA have anything to do about it. While we’re still awaiting to see Tegra 2 chipsets, the manufacturer is lining up quad-core Tegra 4 chips for use inside Android devices.

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made the announcement that not only are the Tegra 3 chips nearing completion, but that work has already begun on the Tegra 4 gear. It wont stop their either, with Huang promising “every single year, there will be a new Tegra”.

It’s another boost for the rapidly-growing Android OS. Expect to see some very speedy phones touching down next year.

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Nvidia Tegra 2 is finally finding itself inside newer smartphones. Before you judge the Tegra 2’s performance over any other smartphone processor, lets look what Nvidia has to give the smartphone market.

The Nvidia Tegra 2 chip combines a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor (Max. to 1GHz speeds) with Nvidia graphics pipeline to create a platform which is expected to be used in a number of HD tablets, smartbooks and smartphones launching in 2011.

The Tegra 2 is designed to perform absolutely awsome in HD multimedia and gaming. For the matter of fact the Tegra 2 can stream 1080p video, has HDMI-out and benefits from Flash Player 10.1 hardware acceleration. Nvidia claims Tegra 2 can deliver over 16 hours of HD video on a single charge which is astonishing.

The chipset combines eight independent processors (including Cortex A9) to optimise power usage at all times. It also means it can easily handle mobile 3D gaming, web browsing as well as HD video encoding. Nvidia claims that it is 10x faster than the CPUs found in current smartphones, whilst delivering 4x the performance of the first Tegra chip.

Tegra 2 3D (T25/AP25)

Nvidia is romoured to bring up Tegra 2 3D, a different version of the Tegra 2 which will additionally have the power of generating 3D images to the smartphone displays.

John W. Daly Wrote (Nvidia’s Tegra 2 3D unveiled): “Nvidia’s Tegra 2 3D holds the promise of being a game changing platform in the mobile arena, much to the detriment of Intel, whose Atom simply can’t compete in terms of energy nor graphical performance. It seems trying to shut Nvidia out of the world of netbooks backfired, a sign of imperial hubris, letting Chipzilla fall flat on its face in a new, infant market.” 😉